Finnish website Muropaketti has scored some exclusive pictures of Asus' upcoming Rampage II Extreme X58 motherboard and for some, the bad news is that this board doesn't feature the Nvidia NF200 chip, but it has a few other tricks up its sleeve.

It doesn't look like the pictures are of a final board, as for one the cooling is far from what we'd expect to see on a high-end Asus motherboard. Asus has gone for its 16-phase power regulation, but this board has a very odd riser board which is labelled VTT CPU Power Card, and we're not quite sure why Asus has done this kind of a design. We can only guess that it has something to do with a workaround for overclocking the Core i7 CPUs beyond the current limitations.

There's also a range of eight little connectors at the front of the board which appear to be Voltage readout connectors and there's a mention of a new accessory called ProbeIT, which is suggesting something like a 5.25in Voltage read-out module. The board also features Asus's TweakIT, which allows for manual tweaking of the Voltages and bus speed with the help of a few buttons on the motherboard. This also suggests that we'll see a return of Asus's external LCD Poster.

The board has three x16 PCIe slots, two x1 PCIe slots and a single PCI slot and Asus has gone for six DDR3 memory slots. Around the back is a single PS/2 port, six USB 2.0 ports, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, an eSATA connector, a FireWire port and a CMOS reset button. We'd expect to see a SupremeFX audio riser of some kind, as well, with this board which will take up the top PCIe x1 slot. Finally, there are six SATA connectors, a single IDE connector and headers for four additional USB 2.0 ports and an additional FireWire port.

However, there's one major flaw with this board, it's bigger than the standard ATX form factor and you'd need a case that accepts EATX motherboards due to the increased width of the board by about 1-2cm. This is going to cause some major headaches for people that aren't aware of this and buys this €400 motherboard in good faith, so let's hope that Asus are smart enough to put a sticker on the box that warns about the fact that this isn't a standard ATX motherboard.

You can find the pictures here